2. Phone Usage inToday’s Day & Age
Repercussions of unhealthy phone dependency:
Anxiety levels
Unhealthy decision making
Diminished self-esteem
Poor academic performance
3. Literature Review
■ Toda & associates (2006)
• 275 university students
• High phone dependency, lower Health Practice Index scores (health-related decisions)
■ Hong & colleagues (2012)
• 269Taiwanese women undergraduates
• High levels of phone use, higher anxiety and more socially extroverted
■ Bjornsen & Archer (2015)
• 218 medium-sized, Southeastern university students
• High cell phone use, lower academic performance, grades, and GPA
4. Hypothesis 1
Alternative Hypothesis: Students with high levels of
phone usage are more likely to have high levels of
anxiety.
Null Hypothesis: No significant relationship exists
between phone usage and level of anxiety.
5. Hypothesis 2
Alternative Hypothesis: Students who are more
extroverted will have higher levels of phone use.
Null Hypothesis: No significant relationship exists
between extraversion/introversion personality types and
level of phone use.
6. Hypothesis 3
Alternative Hypothesis:
Students with high levels of
phone use are more likely to
have lower GPAs.
Null Hypothesis: No correlation
exists between the amount of
time spent on one’s phone and
one’s GPA.
7. Methods
■ McPherson College students
■ Correlational study
■ Convenience and snowball sampling
■ Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale
■ McCroskey’s Introversion Scale
■ “Moment” on Iphone, “QualityTime” on Android
8. Methods
■ Request data to be exported after several days of tracking
– Average daily phone use calculated
– # of phone checks in a day
– Most used apps
12. GPA Results
• Accept null hypothesis
• A strong enough correlation between phone use and GPA does not exist
• A slight negative correlation does still exist
Relationship BetweenGPA
& Phone Use
13. Anxiety Results
• Accept null hypothesis
• A significant enough correlation does not exist between level of phone
use and level of anxiety
Relationship Between
Anxiety & Phone Use
14. Extroversion Results
• Accept null hypothesis
• A strong enough correlation fails to exist between phone use and extroversion
• A slight negative correlation still exists
Introversion
Relationship Between
Extroversion/Introversion & Phone
Use
15. Discussion
■ Average person uses phone 237 min./day (3 hours 57 min)
■ McPherson College daily average 189.65 min/day (3 hours 9 min)
■ Anxiety vs. # of checks stronger correlation
■ Females used phones more than males by 5 more min.
■ Greater sample size
16. References
• Babadi-Akashe, Z., Zamani, B., Abedini, Y., Akbari, H., & Hedayati, N. (2014). The Relationship Between Mental Health and Addiction to Mobile Phones Among University
Students of Shahrekord, Iran. Addiction & Health, 93-99.
• Bianchi, A., & Phillips, J. G. (2005). Psychological Predictors of Problem Mobile Phone Use. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 39-51.
• Billieux, J., Linden, M. V., & Rochat, L. (2008). The Role of Impulsivity in Actual and Problematic Use of the Mobile Phone. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1195-1210.
• Bjornsen, C. A., & Archer, K. J. (2015). Relations between College Students' Cell Phone Use During Class and Grades. Scholarship of Teaching and learning in Psychology, 326-
336.
• Eysenck, H. (1971). Readings in extraversion-introversion. New York: Wiley-Interscience.
• Ha, J. H., Chin, B., Park, D.-H., Ryu, S.-H., & Yu, J. (2006). Characteristics of Excessive Cellular Phone Use in Korean Adolescents. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 783-784.
• Hong, F.-Y., Chiu, S.-I., & Huang, D.-H. (2012). A model of the relationship between psychological characteristics, mobile phone addiction and use of mobile phones by
Taiwanese university female students. Computers in Human Behavior, 2152-2159.
• Jacobsen, W. C., & Forste, R. (2011). The Wired Generation: Academic and Social Outcomes of Electronic Media Use Among University Students. Cyberpsychology, Behavior,
and Social Networking, 275-280.
• Poorakbaran, E. (2015). Assessment of using of emerging communication tools (cell phone, internet and satellite) amoung young adults and its association with anxiety,
depression and stress. Fundamentals of Mental Health, 254-259.
• Richmond, V., & McCroskey, J. (1998). Communication apprehension, avoidance and effectiveness. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
• Siddiqui, M., & Ali, A. (2015). Addictive Cell Phone Usage: The Relationship Between Impulsiveness and Behavioral Addidction. Pakistan Journal of Psychology, 53-67.
• Toda, M., Monden, K., Kubo, K., & Morimoto, K. (2006). Mobile phone Dependence and Health-Related Lifestyle of University Students. Social Behavior and Personality,
1277-1284.
• Zigmond, A., & Snaith, R. (1983). The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 67(6), 361-370.
My name is Rhiannon Kuhn and my senior thesis research project examines the effects of mobile phone dependency.
The reason I was interested in this topic is because technology and cell phones is a prominent barrier between generations in today’s day and age and the potential effects of being overly-reliant on your cell phone isn’t always necessarily acknowledged which may include changes in anxiety, poor health decisions, diminished self-esteem and negative effects on academic performance.
Three key studies that further emphasize the effects of unhealthy cell phone use include Toda and his associates research which examined 275 university student’s phone use and additionally analyzed Health Practice Index Scores which is basically a way of measuring a person’s health-related decisions. What was found was that the students who fell in the high phone dependency group tended to have lower health practice index scores.
Additionally, Hong and his colleagues looked at phone use and both anxiety and social extroversion within 269 Taiwanese women undergraduates. Their research concluded that those who have high levels of phone use tended to be more anxious and also were more social extroverted.
Finally, Bjornsen and Archer examined 218 students from a medium-sized Southeastern university. The data revealed that high cell phone use was associated with lower academic performance and GPAs.
For my study, I wanted to look further into three different variables. My first hypothesis is that students with high levels of phone usage are more likely to have higher levels of anxiety. My null being that there is no significant relationship.
My second hypothesis is that students who are more socially extroverted are more likely to have high levels of phone and my null being that there is no correlation between these two factors. The reason for this is that I think people who are more extroverted are more eager to be connected to those around them.
My final hypothesis is that students with high levels of phone use are more likely to have lower GPAS. My null hypothesis is that there is no correlation between the amount of time spent on one’s phone and one’s GPA.
For my methods of research, I conducted a correlation study and gathered participants through convenience sampling which is using people who are easy to reach, and snowball sampling by people spreading my project through word of mouth. Participants were asked to fill out a survey which contained McCroskey’s Introversion Scale to give me a better idea of their social personality and the survey also had the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale in order to measure anxiety levels. They were also asked to download an app on their phone which was called Moment on the iPhone and QualityTime on the Android.
Basically the app just runs in the background of your phone and tracks how long you spend on your phone in a day, how many times you check your phone, and also where your time is spent on your phone such as using social media vs. text messaging. After several days, they were asked to export their app’s data and email this back to me so I could pair this with their written survey answers.
Here is an example of some of the questions that could be found on McCroskey’s Introversion Scale. Participants were asked to score each question on a range from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The higher the total score calculated, the less extroverted a person was.
Here is also an example of what the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale looked like being the same idea that participants rate each question on a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. On this scale, the higher the score the more anxious a person is.
For my data, there was a total of 48 surveys distributed of which 34 were returned who also followed through with downloading the app on their phone making a 70.8% response rate. Of these 34 participants, 21 of them are females and 13 were males. Additionally, there was 7 freshmen, 9 juniors, 8 seniors, 9 sophomores, and 1 other class rank.
For the results between phone use and GPA, a correlational bivariate test was ran in order to determine a significance of .390 meaning that I accept my null hypothesis that no significant relationship exists between GPA and daily phone use, however that doesn’t necessarily mean there was no relationship at all. There was a slight negative correlation between the two meaning lower GPAs were slightly associated with higher daily phone use.
Next, for the anxiety results the significance was .843 meaning once again that the null hypothesis be accepted which was that no significant correlation exists between anxiety and daily phone use. There was almost no correlation between these two variables.
Finally, for the results for the daily phone use and extroversion, the significance was .490 therefore accepting the null hypothesis that no significant relationship exists between being more socially extroverted and average daily phone use. Similar to GPA, there was still a slight negative correlation of -.123 showing extroverted people did tend to have higher daily phone use times.
Just some points of discussion, the average person in the United States uses their phone 237 minutes or 3 hours and 57 minutes a day. The average McPherson College student used their phone less than the national average by about 50 minutes less. Additionally, a statistic I looked at was number of times a person checked their phone a day and anxiety. I was curious to see if there was a difference between anxiety and average daily phone use versus how often people were checking their phones and how anxious they were. What I found was that there was a stronger correlation between the number of times they checked their phone a day rather than how much time they spent on their phone. Also something interesting was that males and females almost had the exact same average for phone use. Females only used their phones 5 min more on average. For future research similar to this I would suggest gathering a larger sample size in order to work with larger numbers of data also making it easier to generalize findings to populations.
Here are the references I used throughout my research project.
